Sunday, June 26, 2011

Smultronstället

It is always nice to bake a cake for someone's birthday. What about when you bake a cake a week before their birthday just to test if it will be good? The only cake I've ever really done before was the three milks cake that I posted here a while back. At the same time I was thinking about birthday cakes I had huge batch of local strawberries that came with my CSA. This reminded me of the Ingmar Bergman film Wild Strawberries where I remembered a scene where they are eating wild strawberries with some fresh milk. That sounds great! Wikipedia tells me that the Swedish title of the film is Smultronstället which literally means "the wild strawberry patch", but can also be taken to mean a "underrated gem of a place (often with personal or sentimental value)." That sounds great too! And really if strawberries and milk sounds good, just imagine strawberries and three milks!

I pretty much followed the exact process given in the old posting, but would reduce a bit more the amount of sweetened condensed milk. This cake is already pretty sweet to begin with and the strawberries only add more.

Wash and halve the strawberries (these were small local ones, if your strawberries have been taking steroids, you may want to cut them smaller!). Then incorporate them into the cake batter and put in the over for 20-30 min at 350 F.

While the cake was taking its time in the oven, I made the frosting. This also could be a bit less sweet. I beat 2 egg whites with a little less than half a cup of honey in a double boiler.

Which after a few minutes magically looks like this:

Don't forget to take the cake out of the oven! Or else it may look a bit darker than this:

Poke holes throughout the cake and then pour the milks on top!

Add some more strawberries? Sure, why not?

And the frosting!

Then go jogging for maybe half an hour before eating so that you don't feel bad about eating this. The actual birthday cake cooking will happen soon, also with strawberries, but maybe in a different form, with fewer milks, and more relaxed jogging requirements.